If you wish to locate all occurrences of a given species in a regional flora, trail guide, or anyplace else, simply enter the species names in quotes. The quotes are needed to eliminate matches of the genus name and the specific epithet each to a different species. Example:
"Tauschia arguta"
A search on 15 January 2004 using this string returned 21 pages: 13 floras, 4 trail guides, 1 update log, and "3 pages very similar to one of these 18 pages". Without the quotes, an additional page is found that has the species Sanicula arguta and Tauschia hartwegii.
Of course, you can also search using common names, but if your common name doesn't match the one we use ("southern tauschia" in this example), the search will be unsuccessful.
As of 15 January 2004, our database contains 18,438 occurrences of 2,870 plant taxa, most of which are online. These occurrences are split as follows: 12,413 occurrences of 2,755 plant taxa in floras from observations and/or vouchers from other people, plus 6,025 occurrences of 1,246 taxa in our plant trail guides. Each subspecies or variety counts as one taxon. These taxa counts include the species, as well as subspecies or varieties if there is more than one subspecies or variety in southern California. Hence the taxa counts are not the same as the number of distinct taxa in southern California.
As of 4 January 2015, 11 years later, our database contains 106,256 occurrences of 4,630 plant taxa, the majority of which are online. These occurrences are split as follows: 72,241 occurrences of 4,602 plant taxa in floras, plus 34,015 occurrences of 2,174 taxa in our plant trail guides and area floras.
If you wish to locate a given species on a trail that has one of our plant guides, search for the species name and the string "plant trail guides". Example: to find all plant trail guides with Tauschia arguta on them, put the following string into the search box, including the quotes (case is unimportant):
"plant trail guides" "Tauschia arguta"
It is very important to check the id? column in the field guides to see if each occurrence is a positive identification, or only a tentative identification. Also remember that most of our plant trail guides are working lists, and you should expect that we have some errors that we have not yet caught.
As a check for the reader to make sure everything is working, on 15 January 2004, a search using the string above returns four trail guides, plus a fifth page that happens to reference once of those four trail guides.
The plant guides found from this search are:
- Sunset Ridge Trail / Mt. Lowe Fireroad in the San Gabriel Mountains
- East Grade Project Trail in the Palomar Mountains
- Blue Sky Ecological Reserve to Mt. Woodson Trail in the coastal San Diego County foothills.
- Garnet Peak Trail in the Laguna Mountains
If you don't find at least these four trail guides, you may not have entered the search terms properly, including the quotes and the correct spelling.
Unfortunately, correct spelling is mandatory. If you don't spell the Latin Name the same way we do, you probably won't find any pages. In addition, note that we have adopted the handful of spelling and other such corrections noted at the Jepson Interchange. For example, the Jepson Manual spelled sourclover as Melilotus indica, but the Jepson Interchange corrected this to Melilotus indicus. We have been gradually updating our guides to the corrected spelling, but to find all occurrences now, you need to search for both names.
The records of searches using Beseen show that misspellings in searches are extremely common.
One way to check for proper spelling of a species is to enter only the genus or the species epithet, and look at the results.